Looking for great ideas: Analyzing the innovation jam

Abstract

We discuss the Innovation Jam that IBM carried out in 2006, with the objective of identifying innovative and promising "Big Ideas" through a moderated on-line discussion between IBM worldwide employees and external contributors. We describe the data available and investigate several analytical approaches to address the challenge of understanding "how innovation happens" and to facilitate the success of future Jams. We demonstrate the social network structure of data and its time dependence, and discuss the results of both supervised and unsupervised learning applied to this data. Copyright 2007 ACM.